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Record Industry Wants Royalties for Used CD Sales
cuberat writes "In a continuing effort to maintain their image as evil incarnate, record companies are considering charging used CD retailers a royalty for every CD they resell. The story is in today's San Diego Union-Tribune here. When are these guys going to get a clue?"
Doesn't this violate the principle of first sale? After all once an item is sold once, you can't force future parties to stick to terms which are not enforcable by law. Thus if I buy a CD and sell it to someone else, I can't be forced to pay another royality on it.
--Karl
In fact, Country Music superstart Garth "Baldie" Brooks has been bitching about his lost revenue to used CD sales for years.
He even tried to strong arm reatailers that sold used CDs by not letting them have any orders for new CDs
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
because there's no good music being released anymore.
Do used book sales generate for authors ? Does Ford get money when I sell my car as used ??
Shhh! Don't give them any ideas! Before you know it, publishers might start going after libraries. Oh, too late...
Actually, that's not entirely accurate.
Sales tax is actually collected against the act of saleing an item which, in turn, results in income to the seller. The tax is levied against the seller, not the purchaser. It is the seller's responsibility to pay the tax, not yours.
However, it is socially acceptable in the U.S. to add the tax on to the price of an item at the time of sale. If you compare this to European countries that have VAT (Value Added Tax), the tax is already figured into the price of the item.
Regardless, the vendor has the option of whether to pass cost of the tax to you (a proper business decision as it's to be included in the cost of item to the vendor) as either being included in the price of the item or in addition to the price.
Either way, it's the same. And it is not double-taxation.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Actually, there's not that much involved in scanning a book. All you have to do is rip out the binding, put the pages in a automatic document feeder (ADF) hooked up to a scanner with OCR software, and you're off to the races. There will be mistakes, of course, but I've gotten a lot of pirate eBooks off the net to read on my PDA, and the quality has been surprisingly good. Given that legit distributors want $10 for an eBook, I'm willing to put up with a couple 'bad's instead of 'had's.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
First, as an AC posted below, this post was lifted in its entirety from kuro5hin.
Second, Jefferson had nothing to do with writing the US Constitution.
However, with some books, I'd be more than willing to pay ten dollars for the etext, assuming a certain level of quality were maintained. Consider WoTC and the Dungeons and Dragons books that they have released as ebooks. Though some of them are horrible, with the original typographical work being replaced by a horribly formatted, bloated format that is amateurish at best, others make use of the original layouts, plus OCRed text to produce a vastly superior product. One which is both printable, to use as a standard book, and which can be copied from, allowing easy production of customized gaming resources from them.
Ah, but there IS fine print on the CD, my friend. It's a COPYRIGHT SYMBOL! Yessiree, mister, that means you're subject to copyright laws when you purchase the product. A quick trip to any legal library or lawyer's office will point out that you are INCORRECT here. Sorry, it was a good try, but you're wrong.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Keep in mind that if the record companies do anything that lowers the perceived value of their product (new and used) then less product will move. If it is a truly bad idea to demand royalties on used CDs, then the free market should respond negatively to it. One example: John Doe walks into a used record store looking for xyz album. This album is from a company that demands royalties on their used albums, and the used record store, working off of tight enough margins as it is, has sanely decided to not simply swallow the cost but pass the cost on to the customer. So John finds that this particular used album is now simply more expensive than he would like to pay for it - so he doesn't buy it. This also works if the store HAS decided to absorb the cost: they will simply have a tendency to not bother carrying as many albums from that company. The only thing that really worries me about the various publishing companies and their desire to cling to antiquated business models would be if they stole from me against my will. An example would be if they convinced the powers that be that their slumping sales have nothing to do with their inability to react to market pressures, but rather because of "pirates". You see this logic crop up quite a bit in the claims that "piracy costs xyz industry 2.5 billion dollars annually" - like complex market forces can be summed up in a single accusatory sentence. If they manage to sell that lie, the next step would be to seek government subsidies to crop up their failing businesses. Look no further than Canada's recent tax plans for a recent example. To summarize: The publishers can be as unresponsive as they like to the market and live in whatever fantasy world they like as long as they don't start robbing me at gunpoint.